Are you always this arrogant and condescending? I mean, you seem to enjoy calling successful and world renown scientists "idiots," so I guess you enjoy that sort of reactionary assessment, but why the need to keep juxtaposing every no religious idea with the foibles of religion. I mean, what's the point? How would you treat a person who kept dividing ideas between horoscopish and nonhoroscopish and how nonhoroscope isn't any better than horoscope?
What would you like to see changed about how science does business?
Only to people who are also arrogant and condescending
Anyway, if you wish to have a friendly discussion: To answer your question in context of the OP, because seeing religion as some kind of special unique case is clearly wrong. All of the harms of religion can be replicated by a non-religious belief system and to demonstrate this requires a comparison of religion and not religion.
Someone like Dawkins is totally contemptuous towards religious believers for their irrationality, something I have no problem with when he is talking about fundamentalists and extremists. However, I disagree with him when it comes to mocking moderate believers. If you enjoy mocking people for their irrationality, then you can expect others to point it out when you yourself are being irrational. I explained why I think he is often irrational and ignorant at the start of the thread.
It's also not the religion v science penis measuring contest that people always seem to try to make it into. Ideas of all kinds can, and will be, misused. The sciences and rationality are neutral, thinking that they will 'save' us is wishful thinking. Good values, wherever they come from, are what matters, and all worldviews rely on ideas that are not objectively provable anyway.
As to what needs changing with 'science', there is no singular science, only sciences. They are very valuable to society, although like anything else they have their flaws (some more than others). In this thread though I've been discussing the way people think about and use knowledge deemed 'scientific', and also about the limits of what science can probably tell us about certain things.
To use an example I mentioned, during/after the Enlightenment many people thought non-whites were 'scientifically' inferior. This was considered proper science at the time, even though now it would be considered pseudo-science. Because it was 'science' though, eugenics and colonisation were seen as
moral acts that benefitted the human race. If something is 'objectively' true, then people are absolved of moral responsibility for acting on it. Even though the science was later corrected (as normative science is supposed to), that doesn't erase the harm already done.
People will act on what they think to be true at the time, and 'science' and 'god' are the 2 ways to believe you are objectively right, which potentially justifies the the worst kind of actions whilst absolving the perpetrator from responsibility.
